How This Incredible Queer Comedy Series Was Saved From Network Limbo

It’s been a tumultuous year for Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher. Last May, the two comedians were nominated for but didn't nab a GLAAD Media Award for the first season of their show Take My Wife, a wryly honest slice-of-life sitcom based on the couple’s own adventures in comedy and marriage that aired on NBC’s Seeso digital platform. Three months later, with the show’s second season already produced and ready to air, NBC announced it would be closing Seeso — leaving Esposito and Butcher in limbo, uncertain if their work would ever see the light of day.

Now, the comedians are all smiles thanks to a deal announced last month: both seasons of Take My Wife are nowavailable through iTunes, and can be streamed via the Starz network beginning May 1st.

“It’s a huge feeling of relief,” sighs Esposito. “[A] season of television we really care about isn’t going on the shelf forever.”

She and Butcher aren’t the only ones who care this passionately about Take My Wife’s second season. The show’s first season saw glowingreviews; writing for The AV Club, critic Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya praised the show, noting that its authenticity helps it “transcend the ‘lesbian show’ label” and that it “radiates on the fuel of [Esposito and Butcher’s] irresistible chemistry” as a result. Because of its realistic approach to queer relationships and heteronormativity, Take My Wife quickly developed a devoted, vocal fanbase. “The strength of our fanbase and our audience is something that we’re super stoked about,” says Butcher, explaining that fans’ passion made a big impact when the two were negotiating with networks. “It’s not just how much money [Starz and other networks] are making,” explains Butcher. “It’s where you’re moving the dial, because [social media] is like a live Nielson rating.”

If their fans are moving the dial for Esposito and Butcher, then Esposito and Butcher are moving the dial for comedy and TV in general. Take My Wife’s second season follows the two as they attempt to simultaneously navigate the comedy world as business partners and plan their wedding as romantic partners. As sparks fly in both areas of their lives, they turn to their robust and loving queer community to help them through. “What Rhea and I were able to do is create a community that actually looks like our community,” enthuses Esposito. “That seems to be the next frontier for television and movies. It turns out most groups of friends are not one queer person surrounded by straight people, one trans person surrounded by cis people, or one Black person surrounded by white people.”

Creating that authentic diversity and avoiding tokenism is something that’s baked into the production of Take My Wife. “We literally cast every part,” says Butcher — and they hire every crew member in a chief position to boot. As Butcher is quick to note, the duo’s hands-on approach isn’t complicated. “It’s all about getting access to a Rolodex or a spreadsheet that has different people in it,” they say, simply. “In our situation, it basically just took an extra week to get the steam rolling on access to those people.” Esposito agrees, adding “that extra week was us going around [to our friends] and saying ‘who do you know?’ and trying to expand our circle that way. It’s just having the intentionality.”

Esposito and Butcher are still in the minority when it comes to putting this ethos into practice. Hollywood casting directors have been reticent to bring more marginalized voices to their tables, as evidenced by the longstanding practice of casting cisgender actors to play trans characters. It’s so ubiquitous that when producer Ryan Murphy cast his new show Pose for FX, the fact that every trans role went to a trans actor made headlines.

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For their part, Butcher says one of their favorite things about the second season was writing both a part for a trans woman comedian (Regan, played by comedian Riley Silverman) as well as another character, Naomi, that isn’t written as trans but was played by a trans actress — Her Story’s Jen Richards. “We did both things,” they laugh. “We wrote a part that is specifically for a trans woman, and then we wrote a part not specifically for a trans woman and hired a trans woman for that part. You can do those things. I don’t want to use the word ‘easy,’ but it also is. My intention is to write a show that looks like my life. This is what it looks like. Here you go.”

Emotionally, the core of Take My Wife can be said to exist in Episode 205, which Butcher both wrote and directed. Digressing slightly from the concerns of their and Esposito’s avatars, the episode follows three other female comedians — Regan, Jamie (Irene Tu), and Bethani (Brittani Nichols) — as they flit through various moments in their days, tracing each back to their performance at Esposito and Butcher’s showcase later that night. It’s an intimate episode that wrestles with gender nonconformity and the expectations of cis- and heteronormative society, as when Bethani encounters a doctor who doesn’t understand her binder; at the same time, the episode also revels in simple joys that keep us grounded, like when Jamie flubs a flirtation with a cute barista and gets her number anyway. Regan’s plotline is the glue tying everything together, her day ping-ponging back and forth between nightmare customer service calls and an emotional milestone with her mother before she joins the ensemble on stage.

Butcher says Episode 205 was originally supposed to be about comedy audiences — specifically, the idiosyncratic one at Put Your Hands Together, the real-life comedy showcase they co-host with Esposito at Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles. When that idea fell apart, remembers Butcher, the episode became “more like, ‘let’s just show what a day in the life of these comics is like,’ because our show is basically us having that. So what if we showed this core group of comedians, and what their day is like and how that informs their comedy?”

“I think our goal for that episode is that we were trying to change the default setting for what a ‘comic’ is,” clarifies Esposito. “When you think ‘standup comic,’ there’s absolutely a mental picture. That’s not everybody we know that does this job….When a comic is on stage and is talking from a straight white cis man’s perspective, I think there’s also an assumption the audience is a straight white cis dude. Like, it’s one straight white cis dude talking to another straight white cis dude…[T]here is no default for the audience, there is no default for a comic. Just like there’s no default for who lives in this country.”

Esposito’s words come at a strange and frightening time for queer people in America, who desperately need the kind of community Take My Wife celebrates, but she and Butcher will soon be turning their gaze abroad as well. Thanks to the show’s runaway North American sales on iTunes, Esposito reveals, Apple will soon be distributing it to the United Kingdom. “I know we don’t all have disposable income,” admits Esposito, “but the disposable income you do have, if you want to be intentional with that and spend it in artists and creators you want to see more from, that can actually have an effect.”

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But to the fans who really can’t buy the show, Esposito reminds us with a smile: “The hashtag is free.”

Samantha Riedel is a writer and editor whose work has previously appeared in VICE, Bitch Magazine, and The Establishment. She lives in Massachusetts, where she is presently at work on her first manuscript.

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